Groove Guild Forms Strategic Alliance with Sonic Lens and Crossfade Partners for New Sonic Branding Division
Sonic branding agency Sonic Lens, strategic consultancy Crossfade Partners and NYC-based creative music agency Groove Guild have formed a strategic alliance to provide sonic branding powered by music intelligence and culturally relevant music and sound to clients. Sonic Lens founder Marco Vitali will serve as a driving force for this symbiotic partnership, teaming up with Jon Vanhala at Crossfade Partners to amplify its existing music intelligence capabilities, and Groove Guild founder Al Risi and creative director/partner Paul Riggio for their premium creative music and audio offerings. The new venture serves as an amplification of Groove Guild’s historic expertise in original composition, which includes the creation of a distinct sonic identity for Burger King leveraged across the brand’s global marketing output for four years, as well as a recent brand launch for the learning platform Wondrium. Their background in original composition paired with Sonic Lens’ history of crafting sonic identities for Fortune 100 brands and whose 2020 gold awards include Disney Junior, Al Jazeera and Oxygen as well as Crossfade Partners’ data-informed music intelligence approach will equip the new joint venture to provide brands with intelligence-driven music strategy.
Says Riggio, “There is value to instinct and feeling where musical choices are concerned. There is also tremendous value in taking a considered approach to a brand’s macro sonic strategy. Brands spend extensive time creating mission statements and visual identities to present their brand’s personality to their audience. Yet music, which cuts straight to human emotion without words or visuals, is often left to a gut decision for each piece of individual marketing content created. Spending time with Marco and Jon has quantitatively shown me what we’ve already known instinctively: A considered, macro strategy is a more effective way to leverage music. I’m super excited to collaborate with this team and introduce our clients to a brilliant new way to communicate the essence of their brand through music.”
Adds Vitali, “At Sonic Lens I have always been deeply engaged with the science of how music can transform brand strategy. Folding in the intelligence at the core of Crossfade Partners’ mission and Groove Guild’s creative excellence and connection to top artists will truly empower and embolden our goal of partnering with brands to help them to craft a comprehensive long term music strategy.”
Adds Vanhala, “In a world where it is increasingly difficult to cut through the clutter of the exploding attention economy, we know that music is the fastest way to create a deep connection and lasting emotional bond with brand marketers’ desired audiences. Applying our proprietary process and unique access to cutting-edge tech, we take full advantage of today’s AI-based marketing and music analytics toolsets to match the right music and sonic branding to the brand's key audience segments. Our human, tech, and data-driven music intelligence process enhances brand strategy while generating measurable uplift on campaign level ROI. The deep musical and technology expertise of the Sonic Lens, Groove Guild, and Crossfade alliance is an exciting opportunity to raise the bar for how brands innovate and create unique value via music" Jon Vanhala continues. "We use the power of bleeding edge technology, artificial intelligence, and data science... but there’s nothing artificial about our musical intelligence."
Groove Guild brings a proven track record in creative excellence across music and audio for branded content since 2013. Throughout the company’s history, their team of talented composers, sound designers, supervisors, sound engineers and producers have worked with agencies and brands to craft culture-defining tracks and beautifully arranged soundtracks to heighten the emotive power on projects for such top brands as Google, Fisher-Price, State Farm, Apple, Volkswagen and Burger King, among countless others. Groove Guild’s demonstrated expertise for harnessing the power of music to create a viral moment is exemplified in a campaign for Jamaican Tourism that hijacked the conversation surrounding the 2014 Sochi Olympics with a catchy track featuring British Jamaican reggae musician Sidney Mills of Steel Pulse called The Bobsled Song.
Vitali is an award-winning audio branding specialist, brand strategist, creative director, music producer and recording artist, Vitali has collaborated as writer, producer and musician with artists like Wu Tang Clan, Quincy Jones, Nile Rodgers, Ceelo Green, Avicii, Tiesto, Q-Tip, Pete Rock, Icona Pop, Organized Noize, and Peter Wolf (J. Geils). He founded Sonic Lens agency in 2019 as a “focused sonic branding” agency, turning music and sound into more powerful tools for global clients by pioneering the new field of “music intelligence” to help bridge the gap between the art of music and the data behind marketing. He has worked alongside a wide range of top brands to strategically build their sonic identities, including Colgate whose sonic strategy was so holistic it required him to serve as Global Head of Music resulting in unprecedented global consistency, brand awareness and cost savings as high as 30% in some markets.
Jon Vanhala founded Crossfade Partners to help companies grow at the convergence of where pop culture meets tech meets brand. This trinity approach means they work with artists, labels, tech startups, and brands. Jon helps companies with a primary focus on marketing sciences, audience analytics, insights, fan engagement, and music tech. Crossfade also partners with major music, media cos, and brands to help them curate the best of new tech. Vanhala's sweet spot lies at the intersection of pop culture, tech and brand. With background as a professional musician, he spent over a decade as an executive for top record labels at Universal Music Group including Island/Def Jam Music Group, Republic, & Verve working with some of the globe's biggest musical superstars including Justin Bieber, Rihanna, Kanye West, Jay Z, JLO, Drake, Bon Jovi, Diana Krall, and hundreds of other artists.
